I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

Famo.us Cracks The Secret Of High-Performance Apps By Tapping Another Dimension

Famo.us is a new platform that allows designers and developers to “design, develop and deploy 2D and 3D gesture-based apps to any device.” (Now in beta.) In the tech business it is what they call a game changer. But not for the most obvious reason.

In the 90′s, Muriel Cooper at MIT Media Lab’s Visible Language Workshop introduced cool looking (but not very usable) 3D interfaces that coincided, in the public mind, with what “cyberspace” looks like. But this idea is flawed on several fronts. First, other than physical product prototyping and scientific and mathematical visualizations, most of the content we view on screen works just fine in two dimensions. Second, cyberspace turns out to have all kinds of novel spatial properties (see the new book, Cyberspace and Security: A Fundamentally New Approach, by Victor Sheymov, excerpted in this comment for more on this), but three-dimensionality is not among them. And finally, the human cognitive system works by reducing complexity and collapsing dimensionality—generally to a flat two dimensions.

A game changer, in technology terms, is an “outside the box” solution to a difficult problem that then allows for innovation on a platform level. To understand how Famo.us has solved the problem, we first have to understand the “box” that app developers have been in.

HTML 5 was, itself, supposed to be a game changer. If the original HTML specifications were designed for navigating hierarchies of documents, HTML 5 was designed to enable web pages to be more like applications. But this “more like” has turned out to be a sticky point. Web browsers are still optimized for the display of documents, and applications—apps—are not collections of documents.

More properly, apps are dynamically generated views of data that a user can directly manipulate. In a Venn diagram, there is an overlap between web pages and apps—many websites dynamically generate views of document based content—but it is the ways that they differ that have given developers problems. The difference in the amount of interaction between an app, its data and its user is of a high enough order that it is like the difference between different dimensions.

This is the insight that allowed Steven Newcomb (founder and CEO) and Mark Lu (co-founder and head of engineering) of Famo.us to crack the performance puzzle of web-based apps. Newcomb is a veteran startup entrepreneur who most famously sold his company PowerSet to Microsoft where it was incorporated into Bing. He and his team analyzed the world of screen-based content and realized that there was no browser-based technology specifically built for rendering apps. HTML was designed for rendering documents, HTML 5′s canvas specification was designed for 2D animation (think the web equivalent of Angry Birds) and WebGL was designed for 3D animation (think Temple Run.) But there was nothing designed specifically for apps (see chart below.)

This is why is a bunch of JavaScript that promises speedy 3D gesture-based apps is such a big deal. As Newcomb explained to me a few weeks ago, “solving for 3D gives you 2D for free.” In the video above, you can see how quickly a famo.us web app is able to swipe through countless layers and scroll through endless galleries of images. The amount of finger action in the demo is playful to the point of obsessiveness, but that’s really the point—people like to play with their apps.

2D is, in fact, just a special case of 3D space—the head-on view. Compare the 2D demo above to the 3D demo (below) to see how much real-time interaction data a Famo.us app can handle.

I think that Newcomb has identified a key quantitative difference between web sites and apps by focusing his innovations on the rendering performance of how views of data models are controlled. HTML 5 is conceptually able to represent the functioning of apps—but in practical execution the amount of interaction needs to be limited so that it does not push the browser’s performance limitations.

To put this in context, let’s rewind to TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF 2012 conference in September where Mark Zuckerberg famously said, “The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 rather than native, because it just wasn’t there.” He was able to admit this because Facebook had just come out with its new native iOS app which has scored significantly higher with viewers. (A native Android app is being tested and should be released soon.)

But why did HTML5 fail for Facebook? The paucity of debugging tools for HTML5 was raised, among many other issues, by Facebook software engineer Tobie Langel, in a post on the W3C public mailing list entitled, Perf Feedback – What’s slowing down Mobile Facebook. The full list of problems is nicely annotated on the InfoQ blog, and included, “scrolling performance,… the need for better touch tracking support on Android, smoother animations, and better caching.” Almost all of these issues, in one way or another relate to the inability to properly address the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) on all of the mobile devices that can access an HTML5 site through a browser. To HTML5, the GPU is a “black box.”

Steven Newcomb also presented at Disrupt SF, and he had already reached this conclusion long before Facebook. I first came across Famo.us in the video of his demo as part of the Startup Battlefield, see below.

His product did not win on the battlefield, and I think he may have learned something from the experience. The blurb for his presentation, which the judges probably used as a cheat sheet to focus their responses to the six minute pitches, emphasized the whizzy 3D aspect of the product, “Famo.us is building a development infrastructure that enables developers to create interfaces similar to those you’ve seen in Iron Man and Minority Report and deploy them to any mobile, desktop, or living room device.” Newcomb himself gave priority to his 3D demo (comparing it, quizzically, to Plato’s cave) and only showed a glimpse of the 2D demo at the very end of his allotted time.

As impressive as the dimensional periodic table of his demo was, especially since it was a web app being manipulated in real time on an iPad, and as compelling as his idea is of making a platform for developers that would be “like WordPress for apps,” the panel was unmoved and seemingly uncomprehending.

It was this experience of having an Ah-ha moment that the Disrupt judges missed, that made me want to contact Newcomb and ask him to walk me through what makes the platform tick. The main point he makes (documented in far more detail in the talk he gave at the HTML5 Developer Conference in October, see video below), is that the biggest problem with HTML5 apps is that WebKit, the open source web browser engine that powers Apple‘s Safari and Google’s Chrome, is built to display documents. So all of the animation effects that you can do in web apps using CSS3 and JavaScript are ways of transforming 2D documents. Compared to the kind of GPU workout created by action games, WebKit rendering is painfully slow and plagued by memory problems.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

This is the beginning of one of the biggest gold rush’s in the web’s history. probably the biggest yet. within a year, every site will be clamoring to have their site redesigned in the new 3D animated swipey famo.us powered style–dare I call it even a “style.”

The leaders of every single niche will face scrappy competitors making a version of what they already have powered by famo.us, and a massive exchange in power will happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if google and facebook killers emerge out of this. mark my words. you heard it here first.

Let’s rally to give Steve and Mark all the help they can get to make their product awesome. We need to build a list of the top design idioms to make templates for, and organize around them on github so we’re not all doing the same thing unnecessarily. Here’s a publicly editable spreadsheet to compile this list:

ps. Meteor.com’s product will also be big. It won’t become big as quickly, but in the long “realtime by default products” will be nearly equal in impact. The mashup of famo.us and meteor to make a globally applicable product will grow to be worth billions quicker than any web application to this date. The person who figures out what that product is will win bigger than the creators of meteor and famo.us combined–because at the end of the day, the product for consumers will make more money than a developer product; and that’s exactly why they called this product “Famous”–because someone is going to become rich and famous making a product on top of it. Ultimately, lots of people will. Well played, Steve! You deserve every penny you’re working to raise right now, and at the highest valuation. Hopefully investors are smart enough to realize this–they’re going to have to be a lot smarter than the investors/judges at Techcrunch Disrupt this fall (check my comments on that techcrunch article). Though it actually doesn’t take that much smarts/experience to get the picture here. Anyway, it’s obvious to us developers. I’d love to be part of what you’re doing in any way possible. You and Marc are ass-kickers. good stuff.

At adsy, we also believe that the future of mobile is the web. We are building a truly disruptive html5 mobile web app that will shake up the mobile apps scene. It will run as smoothly as the best native apps and will be optimized for iOS & android from day one. I’m sure that all html5 champions will love it. And that teens & young adults will also love it (which is even more important ;-)). You can already register for our private beta on http://adsy.me/ We’re looking forward to see what famo.us will bring to the mobile web table. They’ve got amazing credentials & they’re as passionate as we are about the challenge of cracking the code of html5 as a mass market technology. By the way, at adsy we have (also) created our javascript libraries from scratch to enhance performance & give us better control to push updates faster and master all the aspects of our development. I can’t wait to share the app with the masses. And, icing on the cake, it will be as easy as sharing… a URL ;-).

@author…. so basically they are saying that dont let css do the animations do it using transforms and animate values using javascript. Use all the known tricks to improve the speed. Let me know if i am right.